Vol 24 (2011) (PDF, 709 Kb) - Civil and Natural Resources ...

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A Year in the Life – Paul Jowitt’s year as President of the Institution of Civil Engineers Paul Jowitt, Heriot Watt’s Professor of Civil Engineering Systems and Executive Director Scottish Institute of Sustainable Technology, was the Institution of Civil Engineers’ 145th President in 2009-2010. In this article he writes about the highlights of his Presidential year. The Institution of Civil Engineers is the world’s oldest professional engineering institution, founded in 1818. Its first President was the Scot Thomas Telford whose period of office lasted from 1820 until his death in 1834. Thankfully, Presidents nowadays serve for just one year! The role of the ICE President is several-fold – chairing the ICE Council which is the Trustee body of the Institution; Ambassadorial – internally to its 80,000 members worldwide and externally to key stakeholders ranging from Governments to society at large; and in providing Strategic Leadership for the profession. It all makes for a hectic year which take the President to places furth the ICE’s magnificent headquarters building – One Great George Street in Westminster – to all regions of the UK and to places across the world to meet some of it 30,000 overseas members. All in all, it makes for a roller coaster year – but a memorable one. And it leads to unexpected reunions in unexpected places – in my case with some fellow students from my UG days at Imperial, many students I’d taught (some of whom kindly said they seemed to have benefitted from the experience!) and some former colleagues I’d worked with on various projects whilst at Imperial College, Heriot Watt and SISTech. The year as President has a traditional rhythm set by particular events – starting with the Presidential Address on the first Tuesday in November. (“Now is the Time” - http://www. ice.org.uk/getattachment/21ec2403-13ff-43efa883-5a23a1f25c27/Presidential-Address-2009. aspx ). And then the dates of Council, the UK Regional visits, the President’s Reception for Volunteers, the presentation of Awards and Certificates of Membership and so on. But there is a syncopation provided by many other events - presiding over specialist conferences on such as Innovate to Survive, the Role of Infrastructure in International Development, Infrastructure Investment in Zimbabwe and so on – but perhaps mainly by the visits overseas. There is a programmed cycle to these – they aren’t undertaken on the whim of the President! But they can accommodate some of the President’s particular themes for the year – in my case Critical Infrastructure, International Development and supporting Young Engineers. All these have been recurrent themes of my professional life as an Academic, as the Director of two spinout companies (Tynemarch at Imperial and SISTech at Heriot Watt), as a non Executive Director of Scottish Water and United Utilities, and in my various roles within the ICE on society’s expectations of engineers in the 21st century, international development, poverty reduction and climate change, and as the author of the ICE’s 6th International Brunel Lecture - “Engineering Civilisation from the Shadows”. (http://www.ice.org.uk/Information-resources/ Document-Library/Brunel-International-Lecture- 2006--Full-report ). I visited Christchurch, New Zealand to deliver the Hopkins Lecture two days before the first earthquake in 2010. Other visits took me to the Middle East (including Heriot Watt’s Campus in Dubai), Paris, Vancouver, Hong Kong and Sweden – the first ICE President to visit there since Telford! But undoubtedly the most important overseas visit was to Africa – Ghana, South Africa and Tanzania. This was of strategic importance – and reflected by my three key themes. As I mentioned at the outset of this article, Thomas Telford was the ICE’s founding President. Telford came from lowly beginnings who took himself from being a stonemason to the foremost engineer of his time and leaving a vast legacy of civil engineering works that still survive and function today. Telford also wrote poetry. He left a bequest to the Westerkirk Parish Library. And throughout his life he mentored his young engineers. So it was fitting that when the ICE celebrated the 250th anniversary of his birth that the then President of the ICE, Gordon Masterton, introduced a President’s Apprentice scheme to allow a small group of young engineers to workshadow the President during his year of office. They spent time accompanying the President to various ICE events and meetings in London and in the ICE Regions. The Apprentice scheme has been continued by successive ICE Presidents. Given my Presidential themes for the year - Critical Infrastructure, International Development and supporting Young Engineers - this prompted a radical change in the format of the Apprentice Scheme – they would work with me and lead tutors Charles Ainger (MWH) and Ron Watermeyer (SS Inc, South Africa) to produce an engineers toolkit for international development. It also meant that the net for the recruitment of the Apprentices would have to be cast wider than the UK to include graduate engineers who were actually working overseas. The twelve 2009-2010 Apprentices came from the UK, China, Nigeria, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Hong Kong and Zimbabwe. Twelve different first degrees (including graduates from both Imperial and Heriot Watt!), twelve different employers, four women and eight men. And four were based overseas. The result was “An Engineers Toolkit for a Developing World” (www.ice.org.uk/patoolkit) - an open source set of materials and ideas to help engineers plan and deliver infrastructure for international development, poverty alleviation and the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The culmination of a year’s work, the toolkit is a first in the civil engineering field. It was launched at the ICE in London on October 19th 2010. The toolkit was produced through a series of high level CPD events – held in London, Durban, Johannesburg and at UNESCO in Paris – and delivered by experts from industry, academia and the NGO sector. The Durban sessions were augmented by a series of site visits to the world-class Moses Mabhida Stadium (venue for the semi-finals of the Football World Cup), the eThekwini Water and Sanitation Department’s secondary water mains replacement project (using labour-intensive construction methods and developing small-scale contractors) and eThekwini Zibambele Road Maintenance Project where impoverished households generate income by maintaining roads. All these projects clearly demonstrated – at range of scales - the connection between the construction and maintenance of infrastructure and community livelihoods. The apprentices learnt about the role of infrastructure in the delivery of the UN MDGs and its impact in delivering social and economic objectives. In between these CPD events, the Apprentices worked offline and through email to with each other and the tutors to produce a set of 76 themed Method Cards. These are arranged in 5 Themes: 1. Sustainable infrastructure 2. Climate change 3. Financing and anti-corruption 4. Procurement strategy and delivery 5. Capacity and Capability Building 12
And then applied across the four stages of a project, namely: • Policy, which sets the agenda for the planning, procurement, delivery, maintenance and decommissioning of sustainable infrastructure. • Planning, which links infrastructure needs to organisational objectives, policies and strategies? • Implementation, where decisions are made regarding the design, procurement and delivery of infrastructure. • In-use, where infrastructure is operated and maintained before being decommissioned in an orderly way. The Toolkit had its International Launch in Ghana in April 2011 at the Ghana Institution of Engineers in Accra to over 60 engineers and then to over 350 students at the Kwame Nkruma University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. In between the launches in London and Ghana the Toolkit has been showcased at Engineers without Borders meetings and workshops in Manchester, Strathclyde and at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London in the UK – and in Kentucky USA where it drew a particularly positive response from Dirk Bouma (former Chair of the SE Technical Advisory Committee of EWB-USA). The Toolkit has featured various regional meetings of the ICE in the UK and Hong Kong, the Zimbabwe Institution of Engineers UK, the Nigerian Society of Engineers and the Association of Consulting Engineers. Almost all of these presentations have been undertaken by the Apprentices. The Toolkit has also featured in numerous magazine and journal articles (NCE, the South African Institution of Civil Engineering Journal, and the Global Urbanist) together with various in-house corporate newsletters. And funding has been received from the Royal Academy of Engineering’s “Ingenious” public engagement scheme to roll-out the Toolkit in the UK to companies, universities, school students and civil society. Twelve events are planned, and the search has begun to find suitable venues in each of the UK’s 12 ICE regions. Plans are in hand to extend the Toolkit contents and turn it into an i-App, and UNESCO are funding the printing of 4000 hard copy samples of the Toolkit for worldwide distribution. There is no doubt that the successful delivery of the Toolkit was the highlight of my year as President - a year full of so many. There were many who doubted it was possible and in the lead-in to my Presidency I was often asked “what was Plan B?” There was no Plan B. The Apprentices delivered. And that is what we expect our graduates to do. To deliver. To be confident. And to know your subject and its context. Now is the Time! UC Research Offers Solution to Strengthen Vulnerable Buildings An innovative solution for strengthening multistorey concrete buildings was put to the test on the University of Canterbury’s shake table earlier this month. As part of a seven-year Foundation for Research, Science and Technology-funded project on “Seismic Retrofit Solutions for NZ multi-storey buildings” started in 2004, a three-storey reinforced concrete (RC) model building was put through two simulated earthquakes before an audience of staff, students and local television crews. The particular research being tested – part of PhD student Patricio Quintana Gallo’s thesis project but related to a much wider body of research being carried out by a team from the Civil and Natural Resources Engineering Department led by Associate Professor Stefano Pampanin– was an investigation of the seismic response of nonductile pre-1970 RC frame buildings, before and after a rehabilitation or retrofit intervention. The objective was to upgrade the performance of such a structure when it is subjected to strong earthquake ground motions. The model had been retrofitted with GFRP (Glass Fibre Reinforced Polymer) laminates, which are like bandages that can be wrapped around a building’s damaged or vulnerable spots, a solution neither too invasive nor expensive and one that could provide a solution to strengthen this country’s older RC buildings, as well as repair and strengthen the damaged ones, and make them far safer. The use of advanced composite materials for seismic retrofit prior and after earthquake events is becoming, at an international level, a highly regarded solution as proven by the seismic repair and rehabilitation of many public schools after the L’Aquila earthquake in Italy in 2009. The first simulation was based on the ground motions recorded in the CBD during last September’s 7.1 magnitude Darfield Earthquake and the second shake test subjected the structure to the same ground motions of Chile’s 8.8 magnitude quake in February 2010, which researchers believe would be relatively similar, in duration and intensity, to what we could expect in Christchurch from major seismic activity on the Alpine Fault. Patricio said the testing proved that researchers had been able to reverse the “hierarchy of strengths” in the beam column joint region using the GFRP laminates, thus protecting the structure from a soft-storey or “pancake” collapse mechanism, and therefore proved the efficiency of their design for upgrading the performance of these older reinforced concrete buildings. Park and Paulay Fund A fund to commemorate the achievements and contributions of two of our department’s renowned civil engineers has been officially launched at the University of Canterbury. The Park and Paulay Fund, promoted by the University of Canterbury Foundation, has been established to honour the groundbreaking work of Professor Bob Park (1933-2004) and Professor Tom Paulay (1922-2009), both academics in the Department made significant contributions in the fields of structural and earthquake engineering. Professors Park and Paulay received international recognition for their work, which they undertook both separately and together. Their major work, Reinforced Concrete Structures (1975), became a seminal work on capacity design and has been translated into many languages. The fund, launched at a gathering of colleagues, family and friends, will be used to make awards to outstanding young engineers to help them develop into professionals able to contribute strongly to the fields of structural and earthquake engineering. The fund was initiated by Wellington consulting engineer Dr David Hopkins, a former student of both Park and Paulay. Speaking at the launch, Dr Hopkins described the pair as “special people” and said it was fitting that a fund had been established in their honour. He said the fund would encourage young engineers to emulate the work carried out by the two men and to aspire to the personal qualities demonstrated by the pair. The fund was officially launched by Professor Paul Jowitt, President of the UK-based Institution of Civil Engineers, who was in the country to present the 2010 Hopkins Lecture. He said professors Park and Paulay notched up many outstanding achievements of worldwide significance.“Tom and Bob made a fabulous team and they were fantastic mentors and teachers as well as researchers.” Executive Officer of the University of Canterbury Foundation, Shelagh Murray, said donations have already been received from around the world. “We are hoping to achieve our target of $200,000 to establish a capital fund for awarding of scholarships.” 13
Page 1: Civil and Natural Resources Enginee
Page 4 and 5: Head of Department Message Welcome
Page 6 and 7: Water / Environmental / Hydro-Eco /
Page 8 and 9: Numerical model results: 3D wave fi
Page 10 and 11: Timber / Structural / Geotechnical
Page 14 and 15: Fire / Transportation / Management
Page 16 and 17: Scholarships New Zealand Fire Servi
Page 18: Postgraduate Thesis Completion 2010

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